Intonation and Meaning

Daniel Buring

Description

This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Speakers can modulate the meaning and effects of their utterances by changing the location of stress or of pauses, and by choosing the melody of their sentences. Although these factors often do not change the literal meaning of what is said, linguists have in recent years found tools and models to describe these more elusive aspects of linguistic meaning. This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Daniel Buring presents the main phenomena involved, and introduces the details of current formal analyses of prosodic structure, relevant aspects of discourse structure, intonational meaning, and, most importantly, the relations between them. He explains and compares the most influential theories in these areas, and outlines the questions that remain open for future research.

This wide-ranging book involves aspects of phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and will be of interest to researchers and students in all of these fields, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

Intonation and Meaning

Daniel Buring

Table of Contents

General prefacePrefaceList of abbreviations1. Prominence, accent, focus2. Focus and givenness in flexible accent languages3. Focus and givenness theories4. More on focus/givenness representation5. More on the semantics of focus and givenness6. Prosodic structure7. Prosodic and information structure8. More on focus/givenness realization9. The meaning of tones10. Association with focusReferencesIndex

Intonation and Meaning

Daniel Buring

Author Information

Daniel Buring is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Vienna, specializing in formal semantics and pragmatics. In addition to his work on various aspects of information structure, he has published on a wide range of topics in semantics and syntax. He is the author of The Meaning of Topic and Focus: The 59th Street Bridge Accent (Routledge, 1997) and Binding Theory (CUP, 2005).

Intonation and Meaning

Daniel Buring

Reviews and Awards

"Daniel Büring's book is both a guide for the perplexed and a substantial original contribution to theory in the semantics and pragmatics of intonation and information structure. It will constitute an indispensable reference point for all researchers in the area." --Mark Steedman, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh